‘Superman’ comic originally sold for $ 2.6 million at auction
A copy of Superman # 1, first printed in 1939 and selling for 10 cents at the time, recently sold for just over $ 2.6 million in an auction that ended Thursday night.
The comic was released a year after the Superman comic was introduced in Action comics # 1, which showed the hero lifting a car on the cover.
The comic sold Thursday on ComicConnect.com, an online auction and comic marketplace, shows Superman performing one of his famous feats: jumping over tall buildings in one fell swoop.
The website also sold a copy of Action comics # 1, released in 1938, for $ 3.25 million in April, which was the record-breaking comic book auction price at the time.
“Now you look at the comics and say ‘superheroes everywhere’. You look back to the 1930s, there was no such thing. So that was literally the first superhero, ”said Stephen Fishler, CEO of ComicConnect.
The description of the Superman # 1 sold on Thursday indicates the copy was sold twice: once on newsstands in 1939 and once in 1979 when Mark Michaelson, who says he paid for his college education by buying and selling rare comics, bought the tape. drawn and stored in a temperature-controlled place. safe since.
Hulton Archives / Getty Images
The all-time record for comics was broken in September, when a pristine copy of Amazing fantasy # 15, the 1962 Stan Lee and Steve Ditko comic that introduced Spider-Man to the superhero landscape, sold for $ 3.6 million.
the Amazing fantasy # 15 was rated by the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), the leading third-party quality reviewer of comics and other memorabilia, as 9.6, the fourth highest rating an item can receive.
On sale in September, only four editions of Amazing fantasy No.15 had a rating of 9.6, with no version of 9.8 existing, according to Hollywood journalist.
Collector coin sales have exploded into profitability in recent years, with several records being set in auction prices for comic books and sports trading cards.
According to The Action Network, a sports betting site, the highest price in sports trading card auctions is an Honus Wagner card that sold for $ 6.6 million.
Superman, created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, is a pioneer in the superhero genre, and comics featuring the Man of Steel have recently won some super awards.
Fishler said what makes the copy sold this week truly remarkable is that it is very difficult to find high quality copies of Superman # 1.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
